“Dunkirk Spirit” to the rescue

When a care home manager and two colleagues became stranded by the Iceland volcano flight chaos during a business trip to Poland, “Operation Dunkirk” swung into action.

Although not on the scale of the wartime evacuation in which a third of a million British and French soldiers were rescued from the beaches of north-west France, it had the same happy and successful result.

Melanie MacDonald, manager of Scoonie House care home in Leven, Fife had been on an interview trip to Poland organised by Caring People Recruitment.

STRANDED

After three days spent interviewing new care assistants for the Caring Homes Group, Melanie and her colleague Anja Blankers, senior HR business partner, found themselves stranded in Warsaw when all flights between Poland and the UK were cancelled.

Luckily, they were accompanied on the trip by Ben Livermore, an experienced traveller and Caring People’s business development director – and a rescue plan quickly swung into action.

From Warsaw they headed west by train to Poznan for an overnight stay and then an early morning train to Berlin. Then came another train journey to Cologne followed by a further slow train journey to Liege in Belgium.

Meanwhile back at the Caring People head office, a private car and driver were booked on to the Eurotunnel shuttle from Folkestone to Calais. While Melanie, Anja and Ben were heading by taxi from Liege to Dunkirk, the private car was on its way from Calais to Dunkirk where they all met up just in time for the evening ferry crossing from Dunkirk to Dover.

EXCEPTIONAL

A two-hour drive to Luton Airport was then followed by an overnight hotel stay for Melanie before a six-hour train journey via London to Edinburgh and back to work at the care home the next morning – 48 hours later then expected but glad to be back.

“Everyone had important jobs to do and family waiting for them back in the UK so we needed to pull out all the stops to make sure we could get back as quickly as possible,” said Ben Livermore. “At Caring People we pride ourselves on the way we look after our customers but this was obviously rather exceptional. Hopefully our next monthly interview trip to Poland will be a little less stressful!”

Meallmore Care Group

When the Meallmore Care Group found themselves with a serious shortage of care staff, they knew exactly who to turn to – Caring People Recruitment.

“Find as many good care staff as you can as quickly as possible,” they told us.

So we did – and three weeks later 19 new care assistants arrived from Poland to start work in 5 of their care homes in Scotland.

Meallmore area managers Carol-Anne Foote and Anne Mawdsley joined Caring People’s business development director Ben Livermore on a three-day recruitment visit to Poland.

“It was hectic but it was really successful,” says Ben. “We worked with three of our recruitment partners in Warsaw, Krakow and Katowice. Thirty applicants were interviewed, 26 of whom were offered jobs. Out of these, 22 accepted and 19 of them arrived to start work over a three-day period in early December.”

Within a couple of days of arriving in the UK, all 19 new recruits were whisked off to the Fairburn House activity centre near Inverness for a three-day induction and team-building programme.

Their CRB Disclosure applications had all been completed, so by the end of their short stay at Fairburn House their POVAs had been received and they were ready to start their new jobs as care assistants.

Accompanied interview trips to Poland are an excellent way of recruiting significant numbers of staff in one go. “One of our larger clients does one trip with us every month and successfully recruits anything between 10 and 20 care staff,” says Ben.